For the past few weeks I've been working on various things but one project we have been given is to enter the Serco Prize Competition 2013 which can be found here. The theme is London stories, fictional or non-fictional, well known or not well known and after hours of searching I found a ghost story which sparked my interest about a chicken in Pond Square. I thought it would be a brilliant way to go about this competition, doing something funny and spooky (quite a coincidence that it's close to Halloween too wooooh.) While choosing a story to base my design on I was also looking through a variety of my favourite artists to help inspire me and I decided upon Steve Simpson as his style is quite like how I wanted mine to look like in the end. He has lots of fun factors within his pieces and is incredible at typography which is something ill be dabbling in with this piece. Steve Simpson also uses limited colour palates brilliantly which is another reason I chose to base my piece around his work. The competition deadline is 3rd November.. Wish me luck!

A collection of portraits I had done during the course of summer, we had 50 words to do an illustration to and incorporate the text. These are my favourites of the bunch! All are in different mediums; pencil colour, pencil, fine liner, dip pen and ink and Adobe illustrator.

In 2nd year, we were each given a Kurt Schwitters story to base a poster design on which highlighted the main parts of the story. The story that was given to me was Fisch und Mensch (Fish and Man). In short, from what I got from the story was that it was a fish that escaped death from divers by jumping out of the ocean and ripped the wings off a bird passing by, taking the wings it flies to its freedom but gets shot by another man. It's quite a short story with a hint of violence so I had decided to take a different approach to the design and make it look more.. elegant. I was heavily influenced by paper cut outs at this time, and was originally going to do this piece as a cut out but due to lack of time I opted for the paper cut out 'look' which I thought came across quite well. The finishing touches (changing the colour) were done in Photoshop, the design was drawn out in ink.

Wednesday, 16 October 2013

This was my entry for the Macmillan Competition 2013 (unfortunately didn't end up entering in the end) with my story 'Little Princess'. Our tutors told us to look at existing examples of tales/fables/short stories to either illustrate or use as a starting point for our own story (which I ended up doing).An obvious.. I chose dragons because well.. I am just obsessed with dragons! My story was basically about a dragon that befriends a little girl and grants her a wish to cheer her up (he found her crying.. aww). She wished to be a princess so as to grant her wish off he went to find her a crown and played princess with her but as most stories have, there is always a bad guy (dun dun dunnnnn). This bad guy is the King Emperor dragon who, seeing everything through his magic ball, gets jealous of the dragon and little girls friendship and wants her for himself. He flies from his castle (obviously) and challenges the friendly dragon for the girl but loses (as bad guys do) and the little girl and dragon fly off into the sky all joyous, ahhh :)

This was my first time using Photoshop to do anything other then a little photo editing and such so it took me a fair while to complete even with giving myself plenty of time, I still ended up just missing the competition deadline.. boo. I'm still pleased with the outcome and it's definitely one of my most favourite pieces. (I'm not sure about the text but we'll leave it as it is for now..)

These illustrations are from a project back in early march time, we were all given the story 'The Strange Feathery Beast' written by Lee Cooper. There were blank spaces next to some parts of the text for us to fill with our illustrations of the story. I haven't posted all the pages, only the ones with my illustrations on so if you're trying to read the text like a story.. it won't make much sense! I opted for a silhouette style for this, due to doing my usual browsing different illustrative sites such as Behance, Pinterest, Illustration Served etc to get inspiration I found myself being drawn more towards this design. I liked the simplistic look and thought it would come across well within the story having bold illustrations. I used dip pen and Indian ink for the finals.

This was one of my favourite projects to do as i found it challenging to fit my artwork to a story and within the body of the text.

I hope you enjoy these illustrations, stay tuned for more of my illustrative posts! :)

Monday, 14 October 2013

Finally! My blog is up and running ready to be filled with many illustrative wonders. It's been a roller coaster of a ride trying to figure out everything but I think it's getting there :) Thanks to a lot of help from Blogger genius'. I'm an Illustrator from the UK with a love for both traditional and digital medias. I hope you enjoy my blog, filled with my inspirations and illustrations!